Beethoven PC1 continued: Barenboim/Klemperer

So since my traversal of these different versions of the First Beethoven Pianoconcerto, the music has resonated continuously in my mind (when I see people walking with headphones on the street I wonder as I am ALWAYS hearing music in my head; no need for an iPod).  Fortunately I remembered having another full set on vinyl, also from the mid-1960s: the Barenboim/Klemperer with the Philarmonia Orchestra (also from 1968). Barenboim  in his mid-twenties - similar to Eschenbach - was accompanied by the octogenarian Otto Klemperer. And what a splendid collaboration it is! The Philarmonia play divinely under the late Klemperer: measured but responsive, supremely assured and with a full-blooded, burnished tone. The young Barenboim certainly seems to have the full measure of the score. He plays with remarkable authority and poise for his age (in contrast with Eschenbach whose reading struck me as highly contrived). The recording is perfect, weighty but airy, with exemplary balance and giving a just the right sense of the Abbey Road studio acoustics (I also listened to the finale on the CD and it sounds distinctly less spacious than the LP. The piano sounds harder and more glassy too). The box includes a booklet with very informative and readable notes by William Mann and a delightful commentary by the producer Suvi Raj Grubb. Characteristically, the latter has been truncated for inclusion in the CD booklet. For example, this passage - in which SRG describes the bustle just before a recording session begins - has disappeared:

To an outside observer, chaos appears to reign supreme in the last minutes before the start of a recording session. There seems to be a great deal of casual to-ing and fro-ing by the studio staff. The electrical engineers, trailing yards of cable, change amplifiers, plug in microphones and test them, calling out from the studio 'one, two, three, four - this is the left - LEFT - hand, channel.' The second engineer, usually a junior, slaps tapes on to the machines, happily whistling the latest pop tune the while. Meanwhile, the balance engineer, the king-pin of the engineering staff, gets the feel of his microphones by waggling the controls on his panels - one moment you hear the horns in unnaturally brilliant close-up, practising scales, and the next you hear a violinist telling her neighbour: 'In our house we like it with onions'. And high above all the other sounds, of the orchestra arriving, chairs being moved and instruments being tuned, the whine of frequencies with which engineers test their equipment adds a penetrating counterpoint. Everything gradually becomes increasingly frenzied, and just as the outside observer might well begin to wonder how any organized work could possibly start a few seconds later, all activity tails off. Now the only sound coming over the microphones is that most exhilirating of all music sounds - that of an orchestra tuning up ..."